Something wrong with the world

In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus prods Neo to think about his emotions over the course of his lifetime. Hadn’t he always felt out-of-place? Hadn’t he always felt that something was not quite right?

Of course, the answer was yes.

I think this is a common feeling among thoughtful people. But I’m not sure Morpheus had the right answer.

When Isaac Newton looked up at the night sky, he must have been confounded by what he saw. How did it move? Why did it move? What complexity governed the placement of objects in the heavens?

And then he crafted his theory of gravitation. And suddenly, it all made sense.

For a while. After all, by the time Einstein started working on his papers, much more had been discovered. Why did the measurements of the locations of planets not coincide exactly with the theories? Why couldn’t they get the measurements of light’s speed to come out correctly?

And then Einstein proposed his solution, and the world made sense again.

When we don’t understand the way the world works, things will seem off. Maybe our lives will feel just a little weird. Maybe the edges of our experience will seem frayed a little, as if there’s something going on that we just can’t see.

And maybe one day, we’ll suddenly see something, and the world will snap into focus, and everything will make sense.

So if you feel a little off, it’s probably not your imagination. But you also probably don’t need to escape into a dystopian future where man and machine are eternally at war. You might just need to discover something new about the way your world works.

Gary Lee Parker:

I love this thought. Thanks for sharing this, and helping me properly frame this idea.